This is the play-by-play version of the data disaster that opened my eyes to backup services.
Like I said in Part 1, I was lucky that it only affected a few personal files. The lesson-learned is worth many hours of frustration and potentially lost-data.
Here’s how my mini-disaster unfolded:
First I want to set the record straight. I am not exactly a hypocrite because I did make an attempt to back up my data. I’ve been working in the IT industry since 1998. In fact I’ve been working for SolutionPro in some capacity the whole time. In 11.5 years in the IT industry my hands have touched nearly every aspect of this business. I’m a roving employee now so most of the work I do is generated on my personal laptop, stored locally and eventually moved over to the corporate file servers. I thought I could handle setting up a backup routine for my personal and work files. Easy, right?
The Windows Update Crash
It’s May 13, 2010, 8:00 AM- I’m at the Boise airport finishing a routine windows update, sipping a cup of coffee. My laptop attempts a restart, blue screens, and then upon the next restart attempt will not even boot. My life flashed before my eyes. But wait! I’m ok because all my most important work files are on my usb drive.
8 Hours Later
I’m feeling pretty smug now. I downloaded the corrupt registry recovery instructions from the Microsoft Knowledge Base and restored my laptop while I was sitting at the Hailey, Idaho airport. I finished the rest of the recovery when I arrived at home a few hours later. Suffice it to say this process is not for the faint of heart- It involves blowing away the System32\config registry files, inserting the generic ones from the Windows boot cd, rebooting and then completing a system restore- I was one of the lucky ones- it worked for me but there was one hitch- the last workable restore point was nearly 30 days back. Yes- there were more recent restore points but the system restore failed on each of those attempts. Thank you Microsoft!! And I will say I was completely willing to lose everything on my laptop…because all the important stuff was on my usb drive…not…properly..backed up.
Post Mortem
It turns out maybe it wasn’t completely Microsoft’s fault-as fun as it is to blame them. Hard Drive failure seemed to be the culprit. I suffered several other file corruption problems after the above restore. A check of the Event Log showed hundreds of Hard Drive errors that had been increasing in frequency over the previous three months. The final straw was the corruption of a few Quicken working files and the realization that I hadn’t performed a Quicken backup on nearly a month…
You might be asking yourselves.. “For someone who spent the first part of this blog post establishing his technical prowess, why would he make such a dumb mistake?” You would be well within reason to ask this and maybe even call me a few names… The answer is simple- I was busy, distracted, and stupid. I probably deserved to lose all my data but I didn’t because I was lucky.
But had I sustained the same failure on my USB drive, I assure you the story would be quite different and would probably involve tears and blood and eventually heavy sedation.
